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Stop Black Friday Before It Destroys Us All

Welcome back to Make It Stop, where we count down the five things this week that must stop

1. The bloating of Black Friday. After expanding their Black Friday sale into Thanksgiving Day itself, WalMart has decided to say FUCK IT and make America’s unofficial celebration of wasteful spending a five-day affair, presumably handcuffing their cashiers to the register to force them to keep scanning those $29 Blu-Ray players. I have a couple of questions. First of all: Why do people still shop on Black Friday? Why are we creating such a huge demand for Black Friday when you can go online and get shit for a good price at any time, without the fear of being fucking trampled to death? Second, how much cheaper do you need WalMart to be? WalMart IS Black Friday. It’s Black Friday: The Store. It’s already cheap as hell, all the time. I can’t imagine what they do to make their low prices somehow lower. Sam’s Club soda is probably made of petroleum runoff at this point. Hell, everywhere is cheap now. I went to Staples on a random Tuesday and got a printer/scanner/fax thing for $50. Perfectly fine printer and I didn’t have to elbow a baby to get to it.

Black Friday is about saving the absolute most money possible, which means that it’s only useful for people who are saving every last possible buck. In other words, Black Friday is basically richass WalMart’s way of making the poor dance while they fire bullets at them. I bet Alice Walton watches the doors open with a scotch in her hand. LOOK AT THE PEASANTS ALL KILLING ONE ANOTHER HOW MARVELOUS. The people who need Black Friday prices the most are probably the same people forced to work at WalMart during Black Friday. It ain’t right. Just keep your prices the way they are and stop dangling your sales in front of people like a fucking lottery ticket.

2. Getting stuck on the outside of a very tall building and dangling from a couple of wires. This window washing crew got stuck on the 68th floor of 1 World Trade Center—soon to be the home of this very magazine!—and rescue crews had to shatter a damn window to extricate them to safety. This is basically my worst nightmare, come to life. Add a bunch of cockroaches to the washing platform and it’s hell on Earth. Whatever we pay window washers, we should triple it. I don’t want them spending their off days in line outside a WalMart. They are our bravest private citizens, along with those guys who built the Empire State Building and would, like, walk along steel girders a thousand feet in the air. That is crazy business.

**3. Celebrities who have not yet done an oiled butt shot. **We had J-Lo in the "Booty" video, and now we have Kim Kardashian hosing herself down for that Paper cover (say what you will about Kardashian, but I don’t think there’s ever been a famous person who has more deftly handled the art of being naked in public). As a progressive male, I would just like to affirm that this is WAY empowering, and not at all crass or exploitative. So if you have an ass and no one has seen it exposed and moistened, get with the times, people. This is progress.

4. Doctor Doom being a goddamn blogger. Hollywood still does a horrific job of portraying anyone who uses a computer or cell phone for anything. They may as well just set every movie before 1998 so that they can avoid the cinematic poison of shooting an actor looking at a fucking screen. But in an effort to stay HIP and KEWL, the people behind the new Fantastic Four reboot (yes, it’s already being rebooted) have decided to change Victor Von Doom from being a small-country dictator into an "anti-social programmer," which means Hollywood is trying to edgify him by 10 percent. He was already a crazed homicidal maniac. You don’t have to mess with that formula. That’s an evergreen.